Posts For: October 2007

The Do-Nothing UN

10.31.2007 - 6:12 PM

In a development certain to shock nobody, the UN has released a report on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, the cease-fire agreement that paused the Israel-Hizballah war last summer. The new report confirms what most sentient people predicted: that Resolution 1701 would accomplish nothing. Ban Ki-moon’s report assents to what Israeli intelligence and military officials have been saying since the end of the war, namely that Iran and Syria have encountered few obstacles to rearming Hizballah with better weapons.

Detailed in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, the report says that, in addition to the establishment of surface-to-air missile capacity and the tripling of Hizballah’s arsenal of land-to-sea missiles,

Hizballah’s long-range missile teams are deployed north of the [Litani] river, and . . . most of the new missiles include [the Iranian-made] Zelzal and Fajr missiles that have a range of over 250 kilometers and are capable of hitting areas south of Tel Aviv.

Resolution 1701 and the “robust” UNIFIL that has been “patrolling” southern Lebanon for the past year have not been total non-entities in affecting the situation on the ground. Since the arrival of UNIFIL, Hizballah has focused its reconstruction and re-armament on the area of Lebanon north of the Litani, where UNIFIL does not enforce its paltry and symbolic suppression of Hizballah. Hizballah’s activity in this region, which also involves buying up land for Shia settlement, is actually quite strategically valuable—it allows the creation of physical contiguity between Hizballah’s two strongholds in Lebanon, the Bekaa valley/Syrian border area in the east and the Shia south. Creating this contiguity, and planting Shia civilians throughout this territory, are vital to Hizballah’s ability to deter encirclement by Israel in another round of war, and to wage war from among, and with the help of, Shia civilians.

Who is Michael J. Sulick and Does al Qaeda Have a Mole Inside the CIA?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.31.2007 - 5:52 PM

Michael J. Sulick is the man CIA Director General Michael Hayden has put in charge of gathering HUMINT, i.e., human intelligence, i.e., old fashioned man-on-man, man-on-woman, and woman-on-man espionage.

According to Newsweek, “Sulick learned his tradecraft—the James Bond side of spying—in the old Soviet Union. Like other Western spies, he learned to follow ‘Moscow Rules,’ the rigorous countersurveillance measures used to avoid detection by the ubiquitous KGB.”

Sulick quit the agency in September 2004 in a highly public row with Porter Goss, the CIA director who ended getting chewed up by the agency’s permanent bureaucracy, readily helped along in the chewing by his own staff, one member of whom had an old shoplifting charge on his résumé.

The CIA has been repeatedly castigated for weakness in collecting HUMINT. And one root cause of its perpetual weakness is undoubtedly our national fascination with technology, which has led us to invest in hugely expensive satellite-reconnaissance systems while neglecting the relatively cheap art of recruiting spies in enemy ranks.

In the war on terrorism, HUMINT is essential. Satellites are good for tracking tanks and other masses of mobile metal, but communications-interception aside, they are far less valuable for finding out the whereabouts of an Osama bin Laden or a Genghis Khan.

But at the same time, not all HUMINT targets are the same. Soviet diplomats and KGB agents were one kind of target–many of them liked to drink, have sex, and spend money, and some even admired America—all of which made them susceptible to recruitment. Al-Qaeda cell members are something else. They do not like to drink or to admire America; whatever they might do in private with their multiple wives, they are far more puritanical in their attitude toward sex, and among suicide bombers money is seen as having little value in the world to come.

All of this makes them a hard target. And all of this raises a question: if Sulick cut his teeth playing by the “Moscow Rules,” is he the best man for the job?

The Sun Sets on British Airways

James Kirchick | @jkirchick

10.31.2007 - 5:46 PM

The very first thing you see upon entering Harare International Airport is a portrait of His Excellency, the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. I recall my very first steps off the South African Airways flight from Johannesburg last year, seeing that grim visage and understanding immediately that I was entering a totalitarian state (the photo below is from the entrance to the departure lounge).

As a prominent South African told me before I left for Zimbabwe, a surefire sign that you’re in an undemocratic country is the proliferation of presidential pictures. Writing in the Sowetan, a South African newspaper serving the country’s black townships, about a recent trip to Harare Airport, Andrew Molefe observers:

To step out of an aircraft at Harare International Airport is to step into a chamber of horrors.

If an international airport is supposed to be the face of a country, Zimbabwe is slipping dangerously towards the edge of a precipice.

The airport ablution facilities aren’t working. Human waste greets visitors who need to use the toilets. The taps have run dry.

The Future of Afghanistan

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

10.31.2007 - 3:48 PM

Trying to gauge the state of the conflict in Afghanistan from thousands of miles away is extraordinarily difficult and I hesitate to draw any firm conclusions from recent press reports. But even discounting for the “bad news” bias in most articles, their general tenor is cause for concern.

• This article notes that hundreds of Taliban fighters are massing near Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan, for the first time since 2001.

• This article notes that the warlords who once made up the Northern Alliance are hording their weapons and not complying with promises to disarm militias.

• This article notes that the drug trade in Afghanistan is booming, with “a 17 percent rise in poppy cultivation from 2006 to 2007, and a 34 percent rise in opium production.”

• And this article notes that more foreign jihadists are infiltrating Afghanistan, and they are even more bloodthirsty and savage than the native Taliban. “Foreign fighters,” writes David Rohde of the New York Times, “are coming from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, various Arab countries, and perhaps also Turkey and western China.”

Admittedly, there is a positive aspect to this story—the foreigners are needed to fill Taliban ranks because of the losses they have suffered in fighting with coalition forces. But the fact that replacements are able to infiltrate so easily is a major problem, insofar as one of the major factors determining the success or failure of an insurgency is whether or not the counterinsurgents are able to seal the border to prevent the rebels from gaining reinforcements and supplies.

Bad Hair Day

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.31.2007 - 3:22 PM

As an editor at COMMENTARY, all sorts of article ideas are constantly being pitched my way, some of them brilliant, some of them not. Here’s the pitch of the day, which came to me from a PR firm in Beverly Hills:

Dear Gabriel,

We seem to readily accept baldness among actors, musicians, and sports figures, but haven’t elected a bald President for more than 50 years (Dwight Eisenhower). Now it remains to be seen if the most prominently balding of the current candidates—Rudy Guiliani—makes the cut.

How about a story—lighthearted or serious—looking at the connection between leadership and balding. Whether in the White House or in just about any other public environment?

If you’re interested, perhaps you will include comments from one of the nation’s leading hair-transplant surgeons, Dr. William Rassman (www.newhair.com; www.baldingblog.com), who can discuss the psychological forces which drive so many of his patients to him and how transformed they feel after the restoration process is over.

Thank you so much for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Peter Berk
Partner
Crier Communications
Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Bookshelf

Terry Teachout 10.31.2007 - 2:28 PM

• I envy Joseph Epstein, who writes exactly the pieces I wish I’d written in exactly the way I wish I’d written them. From time to time he collects his latest efforts into a book, and I’d say that In a Cardboard Belt! (Houghton Mifflin, 410 pp., $26) was one of the best of these collections were it not for the fact that all of its predecessors have been so consistently high in quality. This one, however, is by design more wide-ranging than many of the volumes that came before it. In the past Epstein segregated his familiar and literary essays into separate books, but In a Cardboard Belt! is an omnium gatherum whose subtitle, “Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage,” accurately describes its contents. Unless you prefer jargon-clotted academic prose to lucidly conversational writing, it contains something for everybody. The titles tell the tale: “Memoirs of a Cheap and Finicky Glutton,” “Vin Audenaire,” “Forgetting Edmund Wilson,” “The Torture of Writer’s Block,” “Why Are Academics So Unhappy?” (A good question, that.) Who wouldn’t want to read a bookful of such pieces?

These days Epstein is more than usually conscious of time’s winged chariot—he just turned seventy—and the introduction to In a Cardboard Belt! offers a wry perspective on his inexorable progress toward the inevitable encounter with what Henry James called “the distinguished thing”:

“Bodily decreptitude,” says Yeats, “is wisdom.” I seem to have accrued more of the former than the latter. Of wisdom generally, I haven’t all that much to declare. I find myself more impressed by the mysteries of life and more certain that most of the interesting questions it poses have no persuasive answers, or at least none likely to arrive before I depart the planet. . . . You live and you learn, the proverb has it, but in my face, You live and you yearn seems closer to it.

About wisdom Epstein is, for once, all wet. In a Cardboard Belt! contains no shortage of glinting nuggets of truth, many of them packed into single-sentence parcels: “Charm is the desire to delight, light-handedly executed.” “Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition, interrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation.” Epstein the critic is similiarly capable of saying the maximum about a writer in the minimum number of words: “Was there ever a genius more stupid than Tolstoy?” “I find the domestic Auden, if not the better poet, certainly the more impressive human being.” “I liked Lillian Hellman and thought her very smart, except when the initials CIA or FBI appeared in her sentences.”

More on the Surge

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

10.31.2007 - 1:09 PM

During the last week there have been three noteworthy news stories regarding Iraq and what is unfolding there. There is this from yesterday’s Associated Press:

The monthly toll of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq is on track to being the lowest in nearly two years, with at least 36 troop deaths recorded as of Tuesday, but the military cautioned it’s too early to declare a long-term trend . . . At least 36 American service members have died so far in October, nearly a quarter from non-combat causes . . . It is the lowest number since 32 troops died in March 2006 and the second-lowest since 20 troop deaths in February 2004. . . . [Maj. Winfield Danielson, a military spokesman in Baghdad], welcomed the lower numbers but stressed it was too early to say it was a downward trend. “Have we turned a corner? It might be a little too early to say that,” he said. “It’s certainly encouraging.”

And this from Sunday’s Washington Post:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said on Saturday that the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq is disrupted and no longer operates in large numbers in any neighborhood of the capital. “In general, we think that there are no al-Qaeda strongholds at this point,” Petraeus said. He added: “They remain very lethal, very dangerous, capable at any point in time, if you will, of coming back off the canvas and landing a big punch, and we have to be aware of that.”

And this from the AP last week:

October is on course to record the second consecutive decline in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian deaths and Americans commanders say they know why: the U.S. troop increase and an Iraqi groundswell against al-Qaida and Shiite militia extremists. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch points to what the military calls “Concerned Citizens”—both Shiites and Sunnis who have joined the American fight. He says he’s signed up 20,000 of them in the past four months. “I’ve never been more optimistic than I am right now with the progress we’ve made in Iraq. The only people who are going to win this counterinsurgency project are the people of Iraq. We’ve said that all along. And now they’re coming forward in masses,” Lynch said in a recent interview.

This is additional evidence that the security situation in Iraq has made remarkable strides this year. Security is not the only metric of success—but it is vital. Nothing good could possibly happen in Iraq until we restored some measure of calm and order there. That is being done, in large measure because al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is absorbing devastating blows.

Pernicious Pentagon Software

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.31.2007 - 12:47 PM

Yesterday I wrote about the danger that the Pentagon might inadvertently purchase foreign-produced “malicious” software to run some of its most critical computer systems.

Now comes news that some new Pentagon software—pernicious if not malicious—is to be domestically produced, and on orders from the Pentagon itself.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Lockheed Martin a $1.3-million contract to develop something called “the Predicting Stability through Analyzing Germane Events (PRESAGE) system.” Typical events that will be predicted “may include rebellions, insurgencies, ethnic/religious violence, civil war, and major economic crises.”

How will it work?

Overseeing Contractors

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

10.31.2007 - 11:58 AM

It’s good news that Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have agreed that the armed forces will supervise all security contractors operating in Iraq, including those like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp that guard State Department officials. This is a welcome step toward achieving greater unity of command and making contractors more useful in aiding the overall coalition effort to stabilize Iraq.

Unfortunately, as this New York Times article points out,

the Defense Department has had its own difficulties controlling its nearly 130,000 contractors, who handle a variety of jobs including interrogations of prisoners and transportation of fuel and ammunition. Auditors have uncovered numerous instances of cost overruns, sloppy work, theft, and corruption in the tens of billions of dollars in logistics and reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

The core problem was laid out in July in this Washington Post article:

The Defense Department’s civilian acquisition workforce has shrunk by about 40 percent since the early 1990s and now has about 270,000 employees, according to Pentagon statistics and Government Accountability Office reports. Yet defense spending on service contracts increased 78 percent, to $151 billion, from 1996 to 2006, the reports said.

There are 7.5 million federal contractors, 1.5 million more than in 2002, without a corresponding increase in government officials to oversee them, said Paul C. Light, a public service professor at New York University.

There is nothing wrong with contracting per se, but there needs to be appropriate oversight, which, as these statistics suggest, has been lacking. The problems are compounded in Iraq, where it’s much harder for federal employees to get around, and which therefore gives contractors much greater leeway.

If the Defense Department is serious about overseeing Blackwater and other contractors, it will have to devote serious resources to the effort. As suggested by veteran contractor Malcolm Nance, the military may even have to set up a new Force Protection Command. While the Gates-Rice agreement is a step forward, the real test will be in implementation.

Michael Scheuer Watch #5: The Danish Affair, Cont.

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.31.2007 - 11:33 AM

A couple of days ago, I started this new department devoted to monitoring Michael Scheuer. I don’t think it will be a long-term proposition. The television shows that regularly bring on this former CIA official as an expert in counterterrorism, I believe, will soon be getting wise, if they haven’t gotten wise already, that they’ve been dealing with a loose potato. Scheuer will soon fade even further to the margins, appearing not in the mainstream media but in far-out places that he has already begun to write for, like antiwar.com, where one of his recent pieces appears under the headline: Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America?

Scheuer has previously responded to some of my comments about him, which have appeared under the titles:

Michael Scheuer Watch, Vol 1, #1

Michael Scheuer: Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Osama bin Laden’s Favorite Pundit

The Jewish Conspiracy.

And his responses have consistently dodged the issues being raised. In my last post about him, with this record in mind, I posed some questions about his role in disclosing classified information that has ignited an anti-American firestorm in Denmark. I predicted that he would answer these questions “with either a telling silence or with even more telling and more irrelevant evasions.”

Scheuer has now answered:

Read More

Pelosi’s Record

Yuval Levin 10.31.2007 - 9:37 AM

Let us stipulate that it is not easy to run the House of Representatives. With its 435 massive egos, each subject to unique pressures and whims, each accustomed to being the biggest fish in his or her own district pond, the House is bound to be unruly. The culture of the place is also not always conducive to following a leader. It hasn’t changed all that much from the scene Alexis de Tocqueville encountered when he visited the Capitol in the early 1830’s:

When you enter the House of Representatives in Washington, you feel yourself struck by the vulgar aspect of this great assembly. Often the eye seeks in vain for a celebrated man within it. Almost all its members are obscure persons, whose name furnishes no image to one’s thought. They are, for the most part, village attorneys, or those in trade. . . . In a country where instruction is almost universally widespread, it is said that the people’s representatives do not always know how to write correctly.

A tough crowd to corral, surely. But looking at Nancy Pelosi’s record of accomplishment after nearly a year, the question arises: can it really be this hard to run things?

For the first time in two decades, the Congress has failed to send the President even one budget bill before the end of October. The Democrats have failed, too, to make much of a dent in the war effort—after having promised their party’s most ardent constituents to reverse course. They have so far failed to capitalize on the opening offered them by the fight over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and they’re plotting an effort to combine the Veterans and Defense appropriations bills with a bloated Health, Education, and Labor bill—which would allow Republicans to paint them as holding American troops hostage to the pet projects of Democratic interest groups.

Almost as important, though, has been the basic failure of day-to-day management by Speaker Pelosi. Again and again, she has allowed her most vulnerable members to be trapped by Republican floor tactics. Again and again she has been too aggressive with the most moderate Republicans, costing her party a chance to win crucial cross-over votes at key moments. Again and again she’s spoken too quickly and had to backtrack embarrassingly (this week, for instance, her staff was caught trying to edit a transcript of a public event to make it appear that she didn’t mean what she clearly said.)

The public has noticed, of course. Congress’s approval ratings are significantly lower than even President Bush’s. Pelosi’s standings in her home state have fallen sharply (as have those of the Senate’s Democratic leader Harry Reid).

Before the 2006 elections, some conservatives argued that a loss in Congress would have a silver lining for Republicans, by giving the GOP a chance to regroup and refocus, and especially by showing voters what the Democrats were like in power. Almost a year into the 110th Congress, it is hard to argue with them.

Michael Scheuer Watch: Table of Contents

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.31.2007 - 12:00 AM

Michael Scheuer Watch #1: The Jewish Conspiracy

Michael Scheuer Watch #2: Osama bin Laden’s Favorite Pundit

Michael Scheuer Watch #3: Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Michael Scheuer Watch #4: The Danish Affair

Michael Scheuer Watch #5: The Danish Affair, Cont.

Michael Scheuer Watch #6: Bad Apples and Basic Questions

Michael Scheuer Watch #7: Heavy Medal

Michael Scheuer Watch #8: Please Pass the Truth Serum

Michael Scheuer Watch #9: AWOL

Michael Scheuer Watch #10: The Cheese Danish Affair and Ron Paul

Michael Scheuer Watch #11: The Danish Affair Is Not Yet Over

Michael Scheuer Watch #12: Expletive Deleted

Michael Scheuer Watch #13: Guilt By Association

In addition to posts here on Connecting the Dots, readers can also find my discussion of Scheuer’s book, Imperial Hubris, in What Became of the CIA in the March 2005 COMMENTARY.

Scheuer subsequently responded to that piece, and I then responded to his response, both of which appeared in the correspondence pages of the June 2005 COMMENTARY.

More recently I examined Scheuer’s performance (or malperformance) as a counterterrorism official in The CIA Examines Itself in the September 17, 2007 Weekly Standard.

Michael Scheuer’s Wikipedia page can be found here. Resources and links to his writings and media appearances found here on the Michael Scheuer Watch can be used to keep it accurate and up to date.

Destroying Missiles

Gordon G. Chang 10.30.2007 - 5:07 PM

On Sunday, Russia and the United States jointly urged all countries to destroy medium-range nuclear-capable missiles. The call came in a joint declaration published by Moscow’s foreign ministry.

At present, Russia and the United States are parties to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987. In February of this year, the Kremlin called for the termination of the INF agreement, as the pact is called. Sergei Ivanov, then defense minister, said: “Today, North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel all have short-range or intermediate-range missiles.” Ivanov continued, “Only two countries do not have the right to have them, the United States and Russia. This cannot go on forever.”

Ivanov was right, but that was not the Kremlin’s reason for threatening to pull out. A few days after Ivanov spoke in February, General Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian general staff, made the point that Russia’s decision whether to terminate the INF pact would depend on Washington’s missile defense plans. Sunday’s joint declaration indicates that the Bush administration was able to get Moscow to step back from maintaining its extreme position.

Can the Pentagon Cope With Malicious Software?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.30.2007 - 4:45 PM

Now we are really in trouble. Here’s a report from a Defense Science Board Task Force on the dangers of foreign-produced software now being used by the Department of Defense. Its central conclusion is that

Each year the Department of Defense depends more on software for its administration and for the planning and execution of its missions. This growing dependency is a source of weakness exacerbated by the mounting size, complexity, and interconnectedness of its software programs. It is only a matter of time before an adversary exploits this weakness at a critical moment in history.

The software industry has become increasingly and irrevocably global. Much of the code is now written outside the United States, some in countries that many have interests inimical to those of the United States. The combination of DoD’s profound and growing dependence upon software and the expanding opportunity for adversaries to introduce malicious code into this software has led to a growing risk to the nation’s defense.

Is this a real danger?

Whose Art Is It, Anyway?

Michael J. Lewis 10.30.2007 - 3:31 PM

America’s cultural institutions have been quietly selling off their art collections, and bad publicity—however shrill or indignant—seems no deterrent. One year ago, Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University sold off Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic—a masterpiece of American realism—to the acute distress of its alumni. Although the sale was criticized widely, the only element of the story that seems to have left a lasting impression is the sale price: $68 million. Two other colleges now seek to turn their own art collections into ready cash. Randolph College in Roanoke hopes to net over $30 million from its upcoming auction at Christie’s, while Fisk University in Nashville is expecting the same amount for a 50 percent share in its collection.

One can sympathize with Fisk, which is in dire financial straits. Ever since it was founded in 1866 as a school for freed slaves, it has teetered on the precipice of bankruptcy. Now, with all of its buildings mortgaged to the hilt, it has turned to this sale as a last resort. This is one case where a sale might do some good to gallery-goers: Fisk has never been able to exhibit its 101-piece collection, a gift from Georgia O’Keeffe, properly. The agreement to share its collection with the new Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas means that the public will at last be able to see such extraordinary works as O’Keeffe’s own Radiator Building, along with major works by Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin. Although the O’Keeffe estate is contesting the sale, claiming that it violates the terms of the gift, it cannot claim that the college has acted in bad faith.

Matters are less clear-cut at Randolph (which has just changed its name from Randolph-Macon and admitted its first male students). While the school pleads financial hardship, it is hardly at the point of shutting its doors. It is for this reason that a group of alumnae and donors have sought a court injunction to prevent the sale, which involves four paintings, including George Bellows’s Men of the Docks and one of Edward Hicks’s many versions of A Peaceable Kingdom. “Artwork should be used for the purpose for which it was given,” the group insists, “which is to educate women in the liberal arts, not to support Randolph College’s endowment.”

One should watch these sales closely: it’s not only colleges that own collections of this scale and value, but libraries and churches, historical societies and social clubs. Up until recently, these institutions have tended to view the stewardship of their art as a public trust, to be passed on to posterity. I think it’s safe to say that there’s now a growing tendency to view them less sentimentally. Depending on the outcome of these two proposed sales, one might expect other institutions to decide that it is time—as one trustee memorably (and somewhat frighteningly) put it—to “monetize their non-performing assets.”

The Yom Kippur War—for Kids!

Eric Trager 10.30.2007 - 2:05 PM

Video games loosely based on historic wars are nothing new. But the recently released “October War,” which invites children to “fight the Israeli Air Force starting from Swais [sic] til Barliv [sic] Line,” offers a new twist to the genre: it is available exclusively on the Anwar Sadat website’s “Kids Corner,” thus making it the first war-themed video game to be released on the official website of a former head-of-state. Indeed, dedicated gamers will be disappointed to find that the Harry S. Truman Library’s kids page lacks similarly inappropriate atomic bomb video games, while other typically dry former head-of-state websites won’t even arouse their curiosity.

Compared to far bloodier video games, “October War” might seem harmless. In the two-dimensional game, players command a tank across various swaths of the Sinai Desert, shooting at an assortment of Israeli bombers, helicopters, trucks, and warships. The game seems deliberately unrealistic: the Egyptian tank is able to arm itself with nuclear weapons and laser beams, while a Star-of-David-clad, King Kong-like gorilla confronts players at the end of the fifth level. (On the other hand, just like in 1973, the Egyptian tank is severely overpowered and destined to lose.) Were it not for the Israeli insignias prominently displayed on every enemy vehicle, “October War” would seem like a more colorful version of Space Invaders.

The Closest of Strangers

James Kirchick | @jkirchick

10.30.2007 - 12:19 PM

Over at Tapped, the blog of the American Prospect, Kate Sheppard links to a story in the Washington Monthly about the political cult leader and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. The anti-Semite who calls for the head of Dick Cheney spent five years in prison for tax evasion, and has been a Democratic candidate for president seven times. But don’t be fooled by LaRouche’s political affiliation or his enemies: Political Research Associates, a non-profit organization that monitors the extremist, right-wing fringe, considers him to be a “fascist demagogue.”

Sheppard expresses widely-held sentiments about this “crazed weirdo,” fascinated at his ability to attract twenty-something “followers” to his various campaigns. She writes of his movement’s “prodigious amounts of crazy” and recommends a recent Washington Monthly story about the suicide of the man who printed LaRouche’s propaganda materials.

Expressing fascination and bewilderment at the enigma that is Lyndon LaRouche, Sheppard ought to have just called up her colleague Robert Dreyfuss, a “Senior Correspondent” of the American Prospect on foreign affairs and national security (he’s also a Contributing Editor to the Nation). Dreyfuss was previously the “Middle East Intelligence Director” for the Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche’s newspaper. Dreyfuss’s very first book, Hostage to Khomeini (which you can download here, on the website of the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement, along with other classic works like LaRouche’s autobiography and Dope, Inc., which posits that the Queen of England is an international drug runner), was published by New Benjamin Franklin House (a LaRouche outfit). The book was co-authored with EIR’s “European Bureau Middle East chief” and dedicated to Dreyfuss’s colleagues at LaRouche’s newspaper.

That conspiratorial tract, by the way, is one that the Prospect’s editors “like.” To learn more about this “fascinating,” fascist cult, Sheppard need look no further than her interoffice phone directory.

Humanitarian Kidnappers

Nidra Poller 10.30.2007 - 10:48 AM

On the eve of the deployment of a joint European-African force on the Chad-Sudanese border in a modest attempt to protect long-suffering Darfur refugees, a slapdash French NGO has created a diplomatic incident. L’Arche de Zoé (a play on l’Arche de Noé, French for Noah’s ark) was caught trying to spirit 103 children out of Chad for delivery to French do-gooders. Six French humanitarians, three journalists, seven members of a Spanish cabin crew, and a Belgian pilot detained in an Abéché lockup since October 25 will be arraigned today and then hastily transferred to N’djamena because of credible threats of lynching by local Islamists.

The story has been covered with unusual diligence by French media. A crisis room was set up at the Foreign Affairs Ministry under the direction of Rama Yade, Under Secretary for Human Rights. President Sarkozy apologized to Idriss Déby, the President of Chad, and French ambassador Bruno Foucher abandoned the distraught humanitarians to the local jurisdiction.

Video footage of an informal interrogation of the suspects by the Chadian President resembled a soft version of a jihadi hostage show, except for the kidnapped children howling in the background, complete with snotty noses, tears welling up in big black eyes, and little hands hugging mugs. The plane crew in uniform and the kidnappers in humanitarian garb are seated on mats on the floor. Zoé’s Ark director Eric Breteau, looking like a naughty boy, stands face to face with the President and his scowling aides. The prisoners are led out in handcuffs. President Déby faces the camera and accuses the humanitarians of stealing African children to sell to pedophiles or, worse, to kill them and sell their organs. (He also accused them of tearing Muslim children away from their faith, but the media brushed over that one.)

Nazi Mitfords

Benjamin Ivry 10.30.2007 - 9:59 AM

On November 6, the New York Public Library’s “Conservators Evening” for annual contributors of $1,500 will honor Charlotte Mosley, editor of the new Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters from HarperCollins. By far the most gifted of these siblings was Nancy Mitford (1904-1973), who produced droll, perceptive histories of France like The Sun King, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire in Love, as well as translations of the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves and the modern stage comedy by André Roussin, La Petite Hutte.

Ever gracious to literary colleagues, Nancy Mitford also contributed an affectionate preface to Lucy Norton’s worthy translation of excerpts from Saint-Simon. Nancy’s sister Jessica Mitford, (1917–1996), by contrast, produced a now-outdated critique of undertakers, The American Way of Death, (1963) as well as a vast amount of now-faded radical polemics. The rest of the Mitford sisters achieved even less. Two were rabid adorers of Hitler, Unity Mitford (1914-1948) and Diana Mitford (1910–2003), the latter of whom was the worshipful wife of Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), the rabidly anti-Semitic founder of the British Union of Fascists.

Smarter Secrecy?

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.30.2007 - 6:46 AM

Chalk one up for my friend Steve Aftergood. Back in 2002, his organization, the Federation of American Scientists, sued the CIA in a fruitless effort to get it to declassify the sum total it was spending annually on intelligence. That number had long been classified. But the 9/11 Commission recommended that it be made public and Congress agreed. The WaPo reports that Adm. Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, will announce today that the fiscal 2007 intelligence budget is near $50 billion. Aftergood’s efforts have borne fruit after all.

But will this revelation damage national security?

Back in August, in a post entitled Secrecy for the Sake of Secrecy, I argued that declassification of the budget total was a bad idea, not because the information itself was sensitive but because it would send the wrong signal.

“Good and completely rational arguments exist for disclosing the intelligence budget,” I wrote. “But the larger fact is that an unfortunate and damaging climate of openness has come to surround things that should be wrapped in darkness. For that reason alone, if for no other, disclosing the total intelligence budget would be a step in the wrong direction.”

Aftergood commented sardonically on my post at the time, saying:

Gabe, I find this argument hard to follow. Can it be that because “highly sensitive secrets . . . are leaked to the press with regularity” we should classify things that are not highly sensitive? Is this some kind of hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you remedy? I think the new consensus in favor of budget disclosure makes much more sense: Smarter secrecy, not more secrecy.

Aftergood and I often sharply disagree about what constitutes “smarter secrecy.” But let’s give him one point in this round. My argument was somewhat perverse. I will take a zero.

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